schmittfamily

There are some Earthcaches that are in locations that cruise ships frequent with the intention of being done from a cruise ship. For example we did GC1510R while aboard a cruise ship on a sea day. But that is pretty cruise dependent.

I tried the update and the app still crashed. I then tried deleting and reinstalling the app and it seems to working.

I am having the same issue. Version 8.13.1 of the geocaching app just crashes upon opening

For entertainment, I created a simulator that models the loss of travel bugs assuming that each time a travel bug is dropped off it has the same chance of going missing. I would say your data implies that the going rate in North America is about 1 out of 5 travel bugs go missing every time they are dropped off. The data is a little more limited for Europe but it looks like about 1 out of 8 travel bugs go missing every time they are dropped off.

I always considered geocaching to be the cheap way to plan a trip. We pick a place to go and make a list of all the tourist caches. Then we figure out the cheapest way to get to the most of those that we can. We get to see a bunch of sites and keep busy with the minimum cost.

We have gotten >10 discoveries in 24 hours on our personal trackable that has never been photographed, shown to anyone, or put into the wild. If Groundspeak is providing an interface that allows for multiple people to mass discover trackables then in my opinion it is on Groundspeak to provide a solution to stopping it. It would seem like providing the trackable owner a setting to accept discoveries or limit the discoveries to X a day would be a fairly straightforward solution. Or adding a "Are you human" test when logging a discovered log.

You should always look before reaching in a hole. I had this guy waiting for me one time:

I suspect the search would be easiest using this approach: 1. determine a list of "layover caches" 2. see if each finder has >1 find in that geography If you are reduced to a manual search, my guess is a sampling of 10 or so of those caches and 10 or so finders for each one may yield a reasonable estimate.

I know project-gc and Groundspeak disagree on which state GC2018 is in. That pops up for us on the challenge checkers and effects our county count. I am not sure what GSAK uses but the first few things I would check are: 1. Does GSAK include American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Guam, Northern Mariana, American Virgin islands, and Minor Outlying Islands (My guess)? 2. Alaska 3. Louisiana

Total counties is available on project-gc https://project-gc.com/Statistics/TopCountyFinders?profile_country=United+States&country=United+States&submit=Filter There is someone listed with 3141 out 3142. I am assuming they are missing Kalawao county in Hawaii. (oops - too slow on the link so more info) Summary: 148 at over 1000 US counties 876 at over 500 US counties 1966 at over 341 US counties Note - it has the original poster listed at 340 counties.

Not sure how I feel about this.... We own a travel bug hotel that is PMO. There was stretch where an account with no finds and a number name was looking at it once a week for a year. It stopped a few months ago but we were never sure what it was about. If travel bugs had been going missing that time I would probably associate the two but nothing weird was going on with the bugs. I kind of liked that I had at list some idea of who was looking at the listing to protect the bugs in the cache.

Having a challenge cache that specifically requires you to find caches with "Hazard" attributes seems weird to me. I would suggest staying in the "Conditions" category. IE - "difficult climbing" instead of "falling rocks" and "watch for livestock" instead of "dangerous animals". (BTW - I am guessing you meant "4 terrain or higher" rather than just "4 terrain")

A full log is one where there is no more room for people to sign. https://www.geocaching.com/seek/log.aspx?LUID=0a10562e-1bde-426f-8ddf-d7add79276ed

I wanted to give a +1 to this. We have a challenge to find two caches of same cache type separated by 6250 miles and to do that for 5 different cache types. When we submitted the challenge, we were actually at seven types at 7000 miles. We went with 6250 miles because it seemed like less of an arbitrary number since it represented 1/4 of the Earth's circumference at the equator. We went with 5 because it seems like after Traditional, Earth, Unknown, Virtual, and Multi you see a big drop off in availability. On your challenge concept, my opinion is 8 cache types in a foreign country is kind of a dividing line. At 8 you leave the cacher the choice if they want to go for the event types or for webcam/wherigos/letterboxes. As Wet Pancake Touring Club points out, event/CITOs/Megas are fairly limited on the dates they are available. On the surface we would love to try for a challenge like you describe - but above 9 the event/CITO requirement in foreign countries would be a deal breaker. (BTW - for full disclosure, we would qualify at 6. At 7 we would be a DNF on a Multi in Canada short.)

In fairness, if someone really wants to sign a log whether the cache is a traditional or unknown won't stop someone from abusing the container. There is an unknown by me that has a puzzle to get the coordinates and a field puzzle to get in that routinely gets abused (and by cachers that should know better).

I have punted on the promotion. Generally I am pretty picky on which caches I will look for. To do the promotion I had to lower my general standards to find the attributes. To get a gem I did a cache before softball right by the field that I had been ignoring for the past 3 months. It is 1 foot inside the park hidden a bush specifically there to give the neighbor some privacy and the cache has been having issues with getting muggled recently. Sure enough I find half a cache like a bunch of other cachers and there is no sign of a recent throw down. I file a "needs maintenance" and promptly get an aggressive PM saying there is a recent throw down so it should be there. Whatever - I going back to being picky about what I look for and ignoring a random constraint from Seattle.

This is a sore topic for me. A local cacher (to me) complained about not getting interesting logs. The next time we looked for one of his caches we came across a structure that made my daughter scared that it was a homeless person's campsite. So we bailed without looking. I wrote a DNF log to with our story thinking he would find it interesting. The CO sent us a nasty PM for the DNF and deleted our log. The next cacher to find it also made snide comments directed at us that it was obviously a kids fort. Boring logs about how today is good day to cache, we decided to look for this cache, we found the cache after a search, and signed log and replaced as found won't get you in trouble. Unfortunately my experience is interesting logs can get you in trouble so I avoid them.

In fairness, if I look at your profile you have 8255 finds. If I divide 8255 by 18 and round up I get 459. Your 459th ranked favorite cache has 20 favorite points. The OP has 3497 finds. If I divide 3497 by 10 and round up I get 350. The OPs 350th ranked cache by favorite points has 19 favorite points. I wouldn't necessarily say you have different standards for favoriting a cache over the OP. If that 1 favorite point per 10 finds makes sense or not depends on how selective a cacher is on what they look for.

We took an Alaskan cruise with Norwegian in 2017 and didn't have any issues. I openly chatted about geocaching with a number of ship/cruise line personnel so we were pretty blatant about it. Our room was two floors beneath the bridge and we did a couple caches from our balcony so the captain could see us using a GPS while he was at the helm. I don't know why a cruise line would care.

I like to get a response as kind of a receipt that our answers were received and our log is being accepted.

We hit a couple of big goals in 2018: 1. Have more career unknown cache finds than traditional cache finds. (700 vs 684 currently) 2. More than 10% of our total finds with >100 favorite points. (189 out of 1793 currently) 3. Maintain more unknown finds than micro finds (700 vs 681 currently) Had a few surprises: 1. Created a pair of finds from the same owner over 3000 miles apart (one find in 2017 and the other in 2018). 2. Created another pair of finds with the same owner over 2000 miles apart (one find in 2014 and the other in 2018). Goals for 2019: 1. Add a new country 2. Get to more than 100 career Earth cache finds. 3. Receive 3 thank you notes from trackable owners 4. Not have a streak of more than 10 finds of the same cache type in a row

You are breaking one of those golden rules - What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Digging back through the logs there are only a couple recent ones from the ground. I wouldn't take that as they are being allowed but that the cache owner hasn't deleted them yet. There are a few later back but they appear to be retro-logged. I am guessing the owner ends up fighting a number of cachers over not going to the top. Having logged this cache I am glad it exists. To be honest we probably wouldn't have paid to go up if not for the cache but it was worth it in the end. The view really is spectacular.

I find it to be situational. When caching as a tourist I prefer popular ones. When caching at home I prefer %. Either/or I would prefer for the people who sort caches based on the favorite point system to have more favorite points to give out. Right now the people with most favorite points to give out are the people who don't use the system and find everything.

We use the number of favorite points pretty heavily as a guide when we are traveling and caching as a tourist. One of the first things we do when visiting a new city is sort the caches by favorite points to see what is there. The result is we are sitting at 1783 finds of which 185 have 100+ favorite points. At the 10 to 1 rate of earning favorite points, we actually have more finds with 100+ favorite points than favorite points earned. We never have favorite points to give out despite being heavy users of the feature. I wouldn't mind seeing favorite point bonuses for every 1000 favorite points found. That way people who use the system to filter caches have more weight in the system.

Of the five times we have found multiple containers at a cache site: a. 2 times the logs made it clear it was replaced by the cache owner. b. 1 time the original container was broken so a subsequent cacher was trying to replace the container - but there was too much swag in the original cache so the subsequent cacher just moved the log and travel bugs to the new container. c. 1 time the second container was from an archived cache that predated the active cache at the same location. Ironically the archived container was the original container of the archived cache and had been replaced by the cache owner. d. 1 time the second container was an unrelated letterbox cache (not listed on Groundspeak). Those are the only times where we have found multiple containers. There have been instances where the logs around our find made it clear there was multiple containers at the site and we only found one. Those cases the logs have suggested a mix of throw downs, the cache owner placing a second (or third) container, or the cache owner agreeing to a proxy replacing the cache.